AI SDLC Forward Deployed Engineer – Associate Manager

AI SDLC Forward Deployed Engineer – Associate Manager

Location: London

Career Level 8: Associate Manager

We are growing our Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) capability to meet our clients' need and demand for hands-on, outcome-oriented AI delivery from PoV to Production. If you are energised by building real things with real clients and by the responsibility that comes with using AI in the reinvented SDLC at enterprise scale, this is the role for you.

As an FDE at the Associate Manager level, you will act as a hands-on technical contributor and partner to Accenture's most strategic accounts. You will embed within client organisations to design, build, and ship advanced product, both traditional and agentic, moving beyond advisory work to own delivery outcomes end-to-end across both proof-of-value and production products and platforms.

You will be an early member of our Industry & Enterprise FDE capability, working alongside senior FDEs to help shape the model, learn and apply repeatable patterns, and contribute to raising the bar for what enterprise AI deployment looks like in practice.

What You'll Do

• Deliver production-quality work — Build and ship applications inside client systems, using AI SDLC workflows and processes ensuring solutions meet enterprise requirements for performance, security, and reliability.
• Develop technical assets — Create reusable, production-ready artefacts or tools including MCP servers, sub-agents, agent orchestration frameworks, and evaluation tooling that can be deployed across client workflows.
• Support enterprise deployments — Play a key technical role in rollouts of frontier AI capabilities, in particular AI in the SDLC processes, ensuring smooth integration with existing IT infrastructure, workflows applications.
• Accelerate adoption — Work shoulder-to-shoulder with client engineering and product teams to drive meaningful AI adoption, removing blockers and closing skill gaps in real time. This will include upskilling people at Accenture and our clients with AI centric engineering.
• Identify patterns and scale — Recognise repeatable deployment patterns across engagements and contribute those insights back to Accenture's I&E FDE practice and our model provider partners to continuously improve our delivery playbook.
• Maintain cutting-edge expertise — Stay ahead of the curve on LLM capabilities, with a focus on the SDLC, agentic frameworks, evaluation methodologies, and the AI product development ecosystem. Potentially helping to define the learning path for others as the area grows
• Build strong relationships — Develop trusted working relationships with client teams and AI ecosystem partners, proactively contributing to new opportunities for AI value creation throughout the engagement lifecycle.
• Represent Accenture in the field — Champion responsible, safe AI usage and uphold Accenture's standards in every client interaction.

What We're Looking For

Experience

• Significant experience in a technical engineering role with client-facing or consulting exposure — Software Engineer, Solutions Engineer, technical consultant, or equivalent.
• Experience delivering production applications with real business impact, ideally in enterprise environments.
• Practical experience working with large language models (ideally in a enterprise or start-up setting): prompt engineering, loop engineering, skill creation, agent development and use, evaluation frameworks, workflows, and deployment.

Technical Skills

• Solid programming proficiency (we are open to any experience but primary languages include: TypeScript and the JavaScript ecosystem, Python and Java). However, flexibility with languages and tools is important with our clients wanting to move to tech stacks including Go, Rust etc. A willingness to go deep into unfamiliar tech stacks is preferred.
• Hands-on experience building and deploying with AI agents and workflows.
• Working familiarity with enterprise IT architecture, cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), and system integration patterns.

Consulting & Client Skills

• High agency; comfortable navigating ambiguity, working across complex organisations, and contributing without a well-defined playbook.
• Strong communication skills; able to participate in technical discovery, support stakeholder alignment, and translate AI concepts for non-technical audiences.
• Collaborative mindset with the ability to balance competing priorities while maintaining integrity and a team-first approach.

Preferred

• Domain exposure in media, or another enterprise vertical.
• Familiarity with AI safety, responsible AI frameworks, or enterprise AI governance.
• Familiarity with AI deployment infrastructure and MLOps tooling.

About Accenture

Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world’s leading businesses, governments and other organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services—creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent- and innovation-led company with approximately 791,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world’s leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. We combine our strength in technology and leadership in cloud, data and AI with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability. Our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song, together with our culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable us to help our clients reinvent and build trusted, lasting relationships. We measure our success by the 360° value we create for our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities.